Thursday, May 27, 2010

Album Covers with Naked Boobies

Sometimes it's fun just to revert to your fourteen-year-old self...

Back when people cared about 'the album' (ask your parents), they also cared about the album cover. Some album covers were awesome, some were horrible. Some had dirty pictures on them... that's what matters here. Fifteen albums with boobies on the cover. Yay!

Note: to keep this 'SFW', I'm only linking the cover image. Mr. Blogspot, I hope you appreciate it...

1. "Time and a Word" by Yes: It was actually seeing this one in a CD shop the other day that got me all adolescent again. It's not exactly a sexy cover; what it is is a weird one, with a giant woman sticking her legs into a checkerboard room. She's wearing shoes and a butterfly. She's a drawing, mind you, but still: boobies all the same.

2. "Abraxas" by Santana: An album cover that certainly piqued the fantasies of any straight teenage boy who ever laid eyes on it. There was a time when Santana's stock in trade was the 'exotic', and God knows it doesn't get more exotic that this: a nude black woman with a dove protecting her modesty gazes at a nude red-and-purple woman with wings. There's all kinds of weirdness going on, and the whole thing would be freaky if it weren't for the fact that the two women are undeniably sexy.

3. "Electric Ladyland" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience: A famous one, this. Apparently Jimi Hendrix hated this cover, preferring the one that's yellow and red and of his face. It's fine, but an ocean of naked laydees, many of which are holding Jimi Hendrix album covers, is way, way better if you're a teenaged boy.

4. "Blind Faith" by Blind Faith: It gets weirder now. This 'supergroup', featuring Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton, recorded only one album together. Looking for a little controversy, I guess, they went ahead and produced this album, featuring a pubescent girl, topless and holding a metal airplane. Why? I have no idea. I was quite shocked when I saw this album cover for the first time - when I was perhaps her age (well, the age she would have been at the time), maybe 12 or 13. I was shocked, because that's something you never see: any younger than that, and it's fine (because they're kids). A few years older than that, and it's fine, too (because they're adults). But this netherworld between childhood and adulthood tends to be completely off-limits, since it's the realm of the sexual predator. Or the supergroup, I guess.

5. "Country Life" by Roxy Music: Strictly speaking, this falls out of the bounds of the description: one of the two women here is wearing a hand-bra, the other a proper bra. But that second one really might as well not be, as the bras in Sears Catalogues never quite looked like that... And of course, there's what's going on down below the waist, where both are wearing panties that could properly be defined as 'scanty', and the one with the proper bra thus has her hands free to... well, I'm not sure how many other albums of the era split their time between the den next to the record player and in the bathroom, behind a locked door.

6. "In Trance" by the Scorpions: Masters of the controversial album cover, the Scorpions have put out several covers that might have appeared in this list. In one case, of course, the Scorpions have an album cover so controversial that the British government actually banned the Wikipedia page devoted to it. This, the band's third album, is a rather more innocent fare. Nudity, yes, but nothing offensive. It's actually, by the Scorpions' standards, tasteful. And there's a no-nipple version available too (actually every album I've mentioned so far except "Abraxas" has a bowlderised version).

7. "Indelibly Stamped" by Supertramp: Some people find tattoos sexy. or rather, I should say that some tattoos are sexy. Yet this cover is perhaps the least attractive one on the list, bar perhaps the pre-teen on "Blind Faith". If it weren't for the very obvious fact that those are female breasts, I'd guess this was a man.

8. "Expensive Shit" by Fela Kuti: This is a really gorgeous cover, all the nicer for being exotic. Fela was a Nigerian folk hero, who constantly fought with the ruling government. The title track describes one such run-in with the junta, and though I don't know the whole story, a group of topless young ladies flashing the power salute behind rows of barbed wire just looks like sedition itself, whatever it describes.

9. "Weapons" by Rough Trade: One from my own personal childhood, as a Canadian child-of-the-eighties. It's not just the front cover: the back cover and inner sleeve are just as saturated with skin, wet and tanned. With body parts cropped up, genders mixed and matched, and both sexes showing equal muscle tone, it was a statement, even as it was equally good old-fashioned titillation.

10. "Surfer Rosa" by the Pixies: This album surprised me, because the Pixies were American, and as far as I knew, boobies were verboten in the USA. But then again, their label, 4AD, was British. It was a great cover: mysterious, Latin American, antiquated... it had nothing to do with the Pixies, and yet somehow everything to do with the Pixies.

11. "The Dwarves are Young and Good Looking" by the Dwarves: Almost every Dwarves album has naked women on the cover. I've chosen by far the tamest one: this is merely breasts, a ski mask and a skateboard. Other Dwarves albums have featured, in addition to full frontal nudity, blood, crucifixion, and a dwarf. They all tend to have a dwarf.

12. "Drinkin', Lechin' and Lyin'" by Boss Hogg: While this also goes against the article's M.O. a bit by featuring full frontal nudity (yes, 'down there' too), this get some kind of guts award, because the incredibly in-your-face cover actually features a band member, Cristina Martinez, singer and girlfriend of band leader Jon Spencer. Quite impressive, methinks,

13. "Pure" by the Golden Palominos: If booby is what you want, booby is what you'll get... all this cover is is a giant breast, tinted red and so huge that it's almost desexualised. Almost.

14. "Simple Pleasure" by Tindersticks: Speaking of desexualised, somehow the frank nudity of this album cover still manages to not be sexy. I'm not sure what it is - perhaps it's the woman's rather more 'natural' body. Perhaps she's pregnant.

15. "For the Beauty of Wynona" by Daniel Lanois: An interesting one, here. Like the one before it, more cinema vérité than cheesecake, the woman is not especially attractive: this ime for being rake thin. Yet the cover, mysterious with its dark, muted colours and knife, is really quite beautiful. And in one last affront, in the United States has the words "American Edition" plastered over the cover just so to cover over Wynona's nipples...